NCRI – The Iranian regime is charging one of the highest prices of any country in the region for its slow, filtered and censored Internet connections, the latest figures have revealed.
Iranian Internet users already have to endure jammed websites and low bandwidth when they go online.
But the Hamshahri newspaper has now reported that the cost of web browsing in Iran is also 12 times the cost of Turkey, three times the cost of Egypt and twice the price of the UAE.
The reason for the high prices was that that the regime wanted to monopolize the technology and exclude large parts of society from going online at all.
The paper wrote on July 16: “The slow internet connection in Iran, continuous jamming, the blocking of the majority of the websites and the high cost are among the calamities for internet users in Iran. But of all these problems, the high cost of the Internet is least mentioned.
“This might be an attempt to keep the technology monopolized for a specific class of society and does not become public and widespread.”
In an interview with a state-run network last year, the former Information and Communication Technology minister was widely mocked by the press after trying to justify the high cost with the comment: “The price of internet in foreign countries is not also very cheap. I had to spend 20 pounds to use the internet when I was at a hotel in London!”
Tehran’s Telecommunication Company recently announced the price of one megabyte of internet per second as 382,000 Rials per month – which also makes it twice the price of India and Pakistan is also half the price in Iran.
Iranian Internet services only function fully for security, intelligence and military institutes, while the regime increases restrictions imposed on ordinary users on a daily basis.
The state-run Mehr news agency reported on Thursday, based on a three-year survey of Internet users: “The trust of internet users in the country’s internet structure has reached such a fragile point that any illogical behavior and neglecting users’ demands could turn into a social-economic challenge.”
According to this survey, 66 percent of the users are not satisfied with the services, and 40 per cent have alternative ways of accessing the internet rather than using the standard ADSL line which 96 percent of them are using.
